When Houston's Church Without Walls deployed simulcasts between three campuses several years ago, each broadcast was rife with artifacts, latency and delay as a result of data packet-loss on the church's best-efforts network.
“Each worship service was a nail-biting experience for our media team,” says Andy Seale, technical director for The Church Without Walls. “It got to the point where we were regularly scrambling our lead technician to our remote campuses to fix our audio and video issues during the service. That's when we knew that we needed a change.”
Enter Masergy Communications Inc., experts in managed networking services and cloud communications. Masergy worked with the church to develop and deploy a high-quality, multicast-enabled network solution that would serve as the backbone for the megachurch's broadcasting capabilities, while also meeting their data and voice needs.
The transition to Masergy's global network platform and Haivisions video broadcasting equipment solved the problems.
“It was a complete network overhaul,” Seale says. “We chose Masergy because of the service they offered – including bi-directional network feeds between campuses – as well as their guaranteed data-packet management and video performance.”
With the new network and broadcasting equipment, Church Without Walls has experienced enhanced video transmission capabilities, more reliable network performance and solid ground to pursue its ultimate goal of multi-site, bi-directional simulcasting of church services for their 20,000-plus congregation.
“With Masergy we don't even have to think about the video reliability and quality anymore – it's the best video we have ever seen,” says Seale. “That is what I consider success.”
John Dumbleton, senior vice president for business development for Masergy, adds, “Real time applications like live HD video perform best when delivered over a high performance network platform. With Masergy's managed global network, which is engineered to support the most demanding, real time applications, The Church Without Walls staff can now focus on their strategic initiates with the piece of mind that Masergy will perform beyond their expectations."
to read the complete Masergy/Church Without Walls case study.
